Reading Quotes - Page 60

I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and "read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so". Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.

We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.

Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense?

In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities.A childhood that wasn't spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no wonder, seems too dull to imagine.

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

If people read poetry, they would be happier.

...human beings are able to attend to issues longer, to think harder about them, to receive deeper impressions that last longer, if information is presented in a context of emotion--a sort of hot dressing--than if it is presented wholly without affect.

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

Books long to be read as we humans long to be loved.

But one day he said to me:‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’‘I’m sorry?’‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.

What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

God always have a perfect way for every imperfect situations.

Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.

Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it's nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen's health. Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.

Deciding what to read is also a matter of filtering.

Between the pages of a book is a lovely place to be

I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.""Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?""How else? Though not till I'm done reading.

So the stories aren't just stories, is what you're saying. They're really secret knowledge disguised as stories.""One could say that of all stories, younger brother.

We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.

Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I’m talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.

The aging Adams delightedly describes being surrounded by books on so many different subjects that interested him as "baits on fishhooks".

Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

Reading is one of the best ways to bond with your child. Bond this Christmas with “It’s Not About You, Mr. Santa Claus

Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Without stories we end up with stereotypes -- a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR.

Five minutes after something happened might not be the best time for you to get into your Facebook and tell everybody. Men's panic does not produce God's power.

Reading literature and engaging in writing breaks through the mental rigidity that experience and repetition breeds.

Reading is not like this... read and read without understanding you just want to finish the book... I had such moments but it's the worst decision ever made. The reading should be process in which you go deeper and deeper, you understand it... you like it... you try to be the same character.... you enjoy it and you want more and more... you have more and more curiousity.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

Sister Ignatius taught me in Sunday School that "in the beginning there was light," but to me, it was always an incomplete sentence, which God should have known to ammend: in the beginning God created light...to read by.

So you’re a reader,” My mom sighs, as if somehow this elevates Isabel to yet another realm of perfection.

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

Maelyn smiled. If books could have litters, she'd be just as happy.

Books need to have their spines cracked, their covers opened, and their pages ruffled for them to come alive.

The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken in at a glance.

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.

All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television.

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment—narrative catechisms.

No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally worth reading at the age of 50.